John Jay College's status as a federally-designated Minority Serving Institution (MSI) places us alongside Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in our commitment to providing life-changing educational opportunities for students of color. In honor of Black History Month and throughout the year, we recognize the role of Black and African American faculty in advancing this mission—not least by setting standards of excellence across diverse fields of research and scholarship.

Faculty representing John Jay across the disciplines include National Institutes of Health grantee Jason Rauceo in the natural sciences. Dr. Rauceo's long-running work on the opportunistic yeast pathogen candida albicans has most recently resulted in a peer-reviewed article in the prestigious open-access journal PLOS ONE. Rauceo's article, co-authored with 3 students, could have implications for the treatment of C. albicans infections in immunocompromised individuals. 

In the social sciences, Maureen Allwood's June 2017 peer-reviewed study of differences between child and maternal perceptions of stress felt by children provided insight into the ways that children and their parents experience stressful life events (SLEs). Dr. Allwood's article made the surprising finding that perceptions of stress have greater associations with the physiological reactions of those experiencing SLEs than the apparent severity of the events being experienced.

Faculty in the humanities continue making rich contributions across disciplines, from philosopher Jacoby Carter's deep explorations on the giant of Africana and pragmatist philosophy Alain Locke (African American Contributions to the Americas' Cultures: A Critical Edition of Lectures by Alain Locke), to historian Stephen C. Russell's nuanced studies of land, territory, borders and other social space in the Bible (Space, Land, Territory and the Study of the Bible). 

Finally, carrying forward the humanities tradition of productive engagement with popular culture, literary theorist Jonathan Gray reviews the film Black Panther in The New Republic, highlighting the hit film's engagement with the pan-Africanist theories popularized by revolutionary thinkers like Frantz Fanon, concluding that the film's balance of "lighthearted fun... with the tragedy of existential loss both personal and intergenerational breathe[s] new life into the superhero movie." To hear Dr. Gray's reactions to the film's runaway success, listen to his recent interview on NPR station WNYC.

To see more research and scholarship from Black faculty members at John Jay, visit John Jay Research Book Talk videos:
 

• Lisa Farrington on the history and cultural legacy of African-American artists, from her book African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History
• Michelle Holder on the occupational segregation impeding Black men's recovery after the recession, from her book African American Men and the Labor Market during the Great Recession
• Jessica Gordon Nembhard on the history of African-American thinking about cooperative economic, from her book Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice
• Khalil Gibran Mohammad on the creation of the idea of black criminality as central to the making of urban America, from his book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America